October 2006
Winning the War Against Spam
Fighting SPAM has become an increasing challenge in every day online life! Even with the passage of the CAN-SPAM legislation, which took effect in the United States in January of 2004, this does not seem to have diminished the volume of spam at all. However, by arming yourself with the proper tools and techniques, in this article, we hope to help you Win the War against SPAM!
Clever ways that spammers find your email address
The first question you may ask is, “Where did these emails come from and how did they get my email address?”. Well, there are many ways in which spammers can get a hold of your email address. Every time you post a message in an open forum wherein your email address is "visible", there are those spammers that go and "farm" these email addresses from these public forums and send spam to them. If you have your email address explicitly stated in any of your web pages, even just in the HTML and perhaps not "visible" on the page as such, e.g. in a field, there appear to be spammers who go and "farm" email addresses straight out of your web pages' HTML and send spam to them too. Once one of them has got it they seem to tend to share, sell, etc. your email address with even more spammers and on and on it goes.
So, does that mean you should stop posting messages in public forums, registering at web sites and/or making your email address available through your web sites? NO! ... Absolutely Not!
So, let's start Arming Ourselves by discussing the ways in which we may prevent spammers from getting a hold of your email message in the first place.
Hide your email address from spam collectors
You may wish to limit your posting of messages in open forums wherein your email address is "visible". You can disguise your e-mail address when you post it to newsgroups, chat rooms, bulletin boards, or other public forums For example, you can give your e-mail address as "wh0Am1@example.c0m" by using the number zero instead of the letter "o" and "1" instead of "I". This way, the reader can interpret your address, but the automated programs that spammers use cannot. And you may wish to only register your email address with web sites, etc. whom "promise" not to share it with or sell it to anyone else.
Preventing spammers from "farming" your email address out of the HTML of your web pages is a much easier way to prevent unscrupulous spammers from getting a hold of your email address(es) in the first place.
There exist some very nice and easy to use tools that will help you encrypt your email address such that you may include it (encrypted) in the HTML for your web pages, your visitors may still click on your email links to mail to you and spammer won't find it to "farm" for their spam mailing lists!
What to do when your email has already been ‘spammed’
In some cases, even with your best efforts of prevention, it is still very possible that some spammer somewhere will eventually get a hold of your email address and then it begins with one unrecognized email appearing in your inbox and then another and so on. However, even though the spammers may have gotten a hold of your email address, there are weapons we may employ such that you don't even ever have to see most of it!
Some of these "weapons against spam" employ an intermediate email box wherein any email message sent to your email address from an unknown sender receives an automatic "challenge/response" message requiring them to go to a site, where they must verify themselves as a legitimate email sender, rather than some kind of "spam-bot", e.g. by typing in a "verification password". Then you receive only those messages from verified senders from this intermediate email box.
These type of "challenge/response" intermediate email box systems are great for eliminating spam from "spam-bots" and/or when the sender and/or reply-to email addresses are not "real people". However, there are still some spammers that will "pass the challenge" and then you will have to manually go up and "block" those senders from your seeing any further messages from them.
Therefore, an even better weapon we have found, use and recommend, for "stemming the flow" of spam, is a PC / client based application called MailWasher. This product is great because it allows you to quickly and easily distinguish "friends from foes (spammers)", "bounce" unwanted email messages and "blacklist" the spammers such that you don't have to hear from them ever again! If you happen to be a Mac user then we highly recommend the use of SpamSieve. It’s quick and easy to control SpamSieve from within your mail client, and you can customize how it interacts with the rest of your message sorting rules.
Stay on the winning side of the spam war
With the effective use of all of these weapons you can successfully reduce spam and take back the control of your inbox. We hope that you have found this article informative and useful so you can get back to focusing on the mail that is important to you!
Enjoy your day!
The Santex-net Team